When first placing Damaris in the stern of the boat, the young man stripped off his jacket and, regardless of her vaguely expressed protest, wrapped it round her feet.  It held the living warmth of his body; and, chilled, dazed, and spent, as Damaris was, that warmth curiously soothed her, until the ink-black boat floating upon the brimming, hardly less inky, water faded from her knowledge and sight.  She drooped together, passing into a state more comparable to coma than to natural slumber, her will in abeyance, thought and imagination borne under by the immensity of her fatigue.

As Faircloth, meanwhile, pulled clear of the outstanding piles of the jetty, he heard voices and saw lights moving down by the ferry on the opposite shore.  But these, and any invitation they might imply, he ignored.  If the hue and cry after Damaris, which he had prophesied, were already afoot, he intended to keep clear of it, studiously to give it the slip.  To this end, once in the fairway of the river he headed the boat downstream, rowing strongly though cautiously for some minutes, careful to avoid all plunge of the oars, all swish of them or drip.  Then, the lights now hidden by the higher level and scrub of the warren, he sat motionless letting the boat drift on the seaward setting current.

The fine rain fell without sound.  It shut out either bank creating a singular impression of solitude and isolation, and of endlessness too.  There seemed no reason why it should ever cease.  And this delusion of permanence, the enclosing soft-clinging darkness served to heighten.  The passage of time itself seemed arrested—­to-morrow becoming an abstraction, remote and improbable, which could, with impunity, be left out of the count.  With this fantastic state of things, Faircloth had no quarrel.  Though impatient of inaction, as a rule definite and autocratic enough, he really wasn’t aware of having any particular use for to-morrow.  Content still held sway.  He was satisfied, profoundly, yet dreamingly, satisfied by an achievement long proposed, long waited for, the door upon which had opened to-day by the merest accident—­if anything can justly be called accident, which he inclined to believe it could not.

He had appointed, it should be added, a limit in respect of that achievement, which he forbade himself to pass; and it was his habit very rigidly to obey his own orders, however little disposed he might be to obey those of other people.  He had received, as he owned, more than he could reasonably have expected, good measure pressed down and running over.  The limit was now reached.  He should practise restraint—­leave the whole, affair where it stood.  But the effect of this darkness, and of drifting, drifting, over the black water in the fine soundless rain, with its illusion of permanence, and of the extinction of to-morrow—­and the retributions and adjustments in which to-morrow is so frequently and inconveniently fertile—­enervated him, rendering him a comparatively easy prey to impulse, should impulse chance to be stirred by some adventitious circumstance.  The Devil, it may be presumed, is very much on the watch for such weakenings of moral fibre, ready to pounce, at the very shortest notice, and make unholy play with them!